Before Brendan Fraser made it hot, Anne Rice made it horny, and Stephenie Meyer made it almost pornographic (but only in a Mormon way), there was Théophile Gautier—the 19th-century Frenchman who looked at a pile of linen-wrapped royalty and thought: Yeah, I could write a love story about that.
Originally published in 1867 and dusted off for paperback perverts in 1970, The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt is less “erotic mummy porn” and more “highbrow Victorian fever dream with a touch of sarcophagus lust.” But don’t let the lack of explicit loin unwrapping fool you—this thing drips with incense-scented longing, orientalist fantasy, and a princess so hot she makes you forget she’s technically dead.
Tahoser, our reanimated Egyptian snack, is everything the French symbolists loved: pale, tragic, mystical, and just horny enough to ruin a man’s life. She falls for Poëri, a hunk with a moral compass so stiff it could double as a pyramid beam. Spoiler: things don’t end well, but they never do when your love interest is embalmed and your plot is written in the era of syphilis and snuff boxes.
There’s not a ton of sex (unless you count ancient yearning as foreplay), but what it lacks in thrust, it makes up for in gauzy, feverish build-up. The whole thing reads like someone tried to write an episode of The Mummy: The Soap Opera while on absinthe and a laudanum drip.
It’s a classic. It’s weird. And it’s way hotter than it has any right to be, considering the protagonist has been dead for most of recorded history.
If you like your erotica old, embalmed, and wearing a golden pectoral plate, this is your jam. Just don’t expect any actual boning—unless it’s the anatomical kind. A nostalgic-ish read, but zero peters on the PeterMeter, sorry.
Get it on Amazon or read it here for free.
—P.
